Hot Blood: Tales of Erotic Horror

price into the troposphere — in a word, hoax time.

It was pathetic. It made my gut throb with hurt and loss, and downtown San Francisco defused behind a hot saltwash of welling tears. I blamed the emissions of the Cal Trans buses lumbering up and down the street, knowing full well I couldn't cop such a rationalization, because the buses ran off electricity, like the mostly defunct streetcars. Once, I'd nearly been decapitated by a rooftop conductor pole when it broke free of the overhead webwork of wires and came swinging past, boom-low, alongside the moving bus, sparking viciously and banging off a potted sidewalk tree a foot above my head, zizzing and snapping. Welcome to the Bay Area.

I had no real excuse for tears now, and wiped my eyes with the heel of my hand. My left hand; my good hand. I was still getting used to the weight of the new cast on my other one.

One of the street denizens for which Union Square is infamous had stopped to stare at me. I stared back, head to toe, from the clouds of gnats around his matted hair to the solid-carbon crustiness of his bare, black feet. He caught me crying with his mad prophet eyes, and the grin that snaked his face lewdly open suggested that yes, I should howl with grief, I should pull out a Mauser and start plugging pedestrians. I put my legs in gear instead. I left him behind with the news kiosk, the scungy, sensationalist headlines, and all those horrifyingly flawless pictures of her. The bum and I ceased to exist for each other the moment we parted.

I know what happened to Tasha. Like a recurring dream, she showed up unannounced on my doorstep just four days ago. Like a ghost then, like a ghost now.

People read People. The truth, they never really want to know, and for good reason.

Her real name was Claudia Katz. In 1975, nobody important knew my name, or either of hers, and I'd already shot thousands of pictures of her. When I replaced my el cheapo scoop lamps with electronically synchronized umbrella shades so new that their glitter hurt your eyes even when they weren't flashing, I comemmorated the event by photographing her. New Year's Eve, 1974 — five seconds before midnight, I let a whole roll rip past on autowind, catching her as she passed from one year into the next. Edited down, that sequence won me a plaque. Today, it's noteworthy only because Tasha is the subject.

'Claudia Katz is too spiky and dykey,' she explained later, as she pulled off her workout shirt and aired a chest that would never need the assistance of the Maidenform Corporation, breasts that would soon have the subscribership of Playboy eating their fingernails. 'Claudia Katz is somebody who does chain mail and leather doggie-collar spreads for Bitch Records. Claudia Katz is not somebody you'll find on the staple page in Sports Illustrated's Swimsuit Issue.'

I pushed back an f-stop and refocused. 'Part your lips. Stop. Give me the tip of your tongue, just inside your teeth.' Her mouth was invitingly moist; the star-filters would trap some nice little highlights. Click- whirr click-whirr. 'Tilt your head back. Not so much… stop.' I got a magnified closeup of the muscles beneath her skin, moving through the slow, programmed dance of positions. My big fan was on, making her amber hair float. 'Hands together, arms back over your head. Turn, turn, turn… whoa, right there, stop!' Click-whirr — another thousandth of a second, immobilized. 'Sports Illustrated? Why bother aiming it at a bunch of beer-swilling beat-offs in baseball caps, anyway?'

'You don't understand the way the world works, do you?' She spoke to the camera lens, because she knew I was in there, watching. 'You've got to make people look at your picture and either want you, or want to be you. When they anticipate your next picture, that means they're fantasizing about you. Saying to themselves, 'Geez, I wonder what she looks like in bed, without that damned bathing suit on?''

It was my privilege to know the answer to that one already. Grinning, I baited her: 'The women say that, do they?'

'No, not the women, you dork.' The warm, come-hither expression on her face was entirely contrary to her tone. She was, after all, very good at her job. Click-whirr. 'The men. When all the men in the country, in the world, lust for you, then you can say no to the lot of them. If all the men want you, then all the women lust to be you. Voila.'

'Excluding lesbians, Tibetian lamas and some Kalahari bushmen.' Her reply begged my sarcasm. She expected it. 'Not that, um, lust and envy aren't admirable goals…'

If I had not been shooting, her brow would have rearranged and a familiar crease would appear between her eyes, indicating her annoyance at my childish, defeatist, irrelevant, smartass remark. And then she'd say —

'You just don't understand.' Right on cue. 'But I'll be on top someday. You'll see.'

'I'd like to see you on top after you finish your shower.' It flew out of my mouth before I could stop it. File a lawsuit if you want. 'It's your turn.'

She decided not to blow up, and rolled her eyes to keep from giggling. Click-whirr. My heart fumbled a beat. I'd just netted a shot of an honest-to-U.S.-Grant human being, peeking out from behind a cover-girl facade of plastic. Nude from the waist up, sensual not from flaunted sexuality, but because her expression let you in on the secret that the whole sham was strictly for laughs and wages. A real woman, not a fantasy image. I wanted that photo. It reduced the rest of the roll to an exhausted, mundane repertoire of tit shots — pretty billboard face, pasted-on bedroom eyes of that inhuman chromium color, the 'ideal,' a dime per double dozen from one shining sea to the next, from the four-star hookers at the Beverly Hills Hotel to the smartly attired, totally paranoid corporate ladies who took their Manhattan business lunches in neat quartets.

'To hell with the shower,' she had said then, lunging at me with mischief in her eyes.

I still have that photo. Not framed, not displayed. I don't make the effort to look at it anymore. I can't.

Claudia — Tasha — got precisely what she wanted. That part you know, unless you've spent the last decade eating wallaby-burgers in the Australian outback. The tiny differences in the way we perceived the world and its opportunities finally grew large enough to wedge between us. Her astronomical income had little to do with it. It was me. I made the classic mistake of trying to keep her by blurting out proclamations of love before my career, my life, was fully mobilized. When you're clawing through the riptide of your twenties, it's like a cosmic rule that you cannot be totally satisfied by your emotional life and your professional life simultaneously. We had been climbing partners, until I put everything on hold to fall in love with her. So she left, and became famous. Not many people know my name even today. They don't have to; I pull down a plush enough income. But it did come to pass that everybody wanted Tasha. Everybody still does.

I was halfway through my third mug of coffee at the Hostel Restaurant when I admitted to myself that I was consciously avoiding going home. Bad stuff waited for me out there. A Latino busboy had made off with my plate. Past the smoky front windows, Geary Street was acruise with the bun-boys that gave the Tenderloin its rep. In New York, where things are less euphemistic, they're called fudge-packers. I wondered what gays made of all the media fuss over Tasha.

Nicole was giving me the eye. She's my favorite combat-hardened coffeeshop waitress in the charted universe, an elegant willowsprout of West Indies mocha black, with a heaving bosom and a lilting, exotic way of speaking the English language. When I watch her move about her chores at the Hostel, I think she'd probably jump my bones on the spot if she thought I could click-whirr her into the Tasha Vode saddle — worldwide model, budding cinema star, headliner. And still missing. When I try to formulate some logical nonsense for what happened to her, I fail just like I did with the street bum. Nothing comes out. Instead, I watch Nicole as she strolls over to recharge my cup. She watches me watching her.

'How'd you know I wanted more, Nicole?'

She narrows her panther eyes and blesses me with an evil smile. 'Because you white boys always want more, hon.'

My house cum studio hangs off the north end of the Fieldings' Point Pier, which is owned by a white-maned, sea-salt type named Dickie Barnhardt, whom no mortal dares address as 'Richard.' He sold me my home and plays caretaker to his pier. I live in a fabulous, indifferently-planned spill-together of rooms, like building blocks damped haphazardly into a corner. Spiderwebbing it together are twelve crooked little